Rico's rants: If it can happen in New York City...

...with all its anti-gub laws, it can happen anywhere.

Joseph Goldstein and Wendy Ruderman have an article in The New York Times a shooting in front of the Empire State Building (and you don't get any more New York City than that):

As the two officers confronted a gunman in front of the Empire State Building on a busy weekday morning, they had to make a snap decision: do they open fire in the middle of Midtown? From a distance of less than ten feet, the officers, Craig Matthews and Robert Sinishtaj, answered in unison; one shot nine times and the other seven.
Investigators believe at least seven of those sixteen bullets struck the gunman, said Paul J. Browne, the NYPD’s chief spokesman. But the officers also struck some, if not all, of the nine bystanders who were wounded.
This was the second time in two weeks that the police were involved in a fatal shooting in Midtown; on 11 August, two officers fired twelve shots at a knife-wielding man after he escaped arrest in Times Square.
The Patrol Guide prohibits officers from firing their weapons if, “in their professional judgment, doing so will unnecessarily endanger innocent persons.”
Browne said that, in Friday’s shooting, the two officers had taken account of their surroundings before firing, as they are trained to do. Video surveillance footage, Browne said, shows that most of the wounded bystanders were closer to the Empire State Building, while the shooter was near the curb.
One of those wounded said he was standing behind the gunman when the police opened fire. “One of the cops shot me in my arm,” a 23-year-old man, Robert Asika, said outside Bellevue Hospital Center. He said that the gunman was moving toward him, and suggested that the officers “shot me probably trying to shoot him.” Asika said he could not “really get mad at the cops. I get it that they were doing their job, but they have to be a little more careful when they are aiming the gun at the suspect and not hit the innocent victims,” he said. Video released by the NYPD shows no one close to the gunman.
The two officers were from the South Bronx, working a tour as part of the Police Department’s counterterrorism deployment at high-profile locations. The duty normally entails helping tourists and the like, and as New Yorkers trickled into work shortly after 9am, this day seemed no different. In the crowd that streamed past was a man dressed in a suit and tie and carrying a black bag, going by the officers calmly and unhurriedly, Browne said. “He wouldn’t have drawn anyone’s particular attention,” Browne said, if not for a construction worker who “pointed him out to these officers”. The worker said that the man had just shot someone around the corner. The officers approached the gunman, whom the police identified as Jeffrey T. Johnson, and the situation quickly escalated.
Surveillance video shows Johnson walking north on Fifth Avenue, between the street and some curbside planters. The two officers gave chase, just as a family of four walked past Johnson in the other direction. The video showed him reaching into a bag, pulling out a .45-caliber pistol and pointing it at the officers. The shooting was over in a matter of seconds.
A number of the bystanders may have been wounded by bullet fragments and ricochets after bullets struck nearby flowerpots, Browne said, suggesting that the bystanders were not in the path of the bullets when the officers fired. Many of the wounds to bystanders were “mostly in the lower extremity areas, such as legs and ankles, which would be consistent with some of the ricochet fragmented ballistics we found,” Browne said. He said there was no ballistic evidence that the gunman fired any rounds as the police confronted him, though the police were still investigating a report by one witness who said the gunman did fire at the police. The officers have been removed from patrol duty; standard practice when one discharges a weapon, the police said.
Browne said officers were trained to take cover, if possible, when facing a gunman, but there was no opportunity to do so here. “They were approaching this man with a gun, and he turns on them, and he is eight feet away, pointing a gun right at them,” he said.
It is not unheard-of for bystanders to be hit in police shootouts. A year ago, a woman sitting on her stoop was killed in a shootout in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, in which the police fired 73 shots at a gunman who had just fatally shot another man. The police have since conceded that a police bullet might have killed the woman but have said the ballistics leave some uncertainty.
And a decision by the state’s highest court in 2010 found that the police involved in a 2005 shooting in Harlem could not be found negligent for wounding two bystanders. The majority decision noted that the officers had not seen any of the bystanders in the area at the time of the shooting. However, a dissenting opinion in the case pointed out that some of the officers had given testimony suggesting that they had not looked.
Officer Matthews is well-known in the Police Department because he had filed a federal lawsuit alleging that, in the 42nd Precinct, there was a strict quota system for arrests, summonses, and street stops.

Rico says this is another case that cries out for using a Taser instead of a pistol...

Gail Collins has a column in The New York Times about the same incident:

We had a shooting near the Empire State Building. An aggrieved ex-employee of an apparel company killed his former co-worker, and was himself killed by police. Except for the famous-landmark location, it was not actually a very big story. Remember the mass shooting at the lumberyard in North Carolina earlier this year, or the one last October at the California cement plant? No? Neither does anybody else except the grieving families.
Nine passers-by were also wounded, and it seems almost certain that some or all were accidentally hit by the police. This isn’t surprising; it’s only in movies that people are good shots during a violent encounter. In 2008, Al Baker reported in The Times that the accuracy rate for New York City officers firing in the line of duty was 34 percent.
And these are people trained for this kind of crisis. The moral is that, if a lunatic starts shooting, you will not be made safer if your fellow average citizens are carrying concealed weapons.
This is not the accepted wisdom in many parts of the country. (Certainly not in Congress, where safety was cited as a rationale for letting vacationers take loaded pistols into federal parks.) Shortly after the mass murder at the movie theater in Colorado, I was waiting for a plane at a tiny airport in North Dakota, listening to a group of oil rig workers discuss how many lives would have been saved if only the other theater patrons had been armed. “They could have nipped it in the bud,” one man told another confidently.
People, try to imagine what would have happened if, instead of diving for the floor, a bunch of those moviegoers had stood up and started shooting into the dark. Or ask a cop.
We are never going to have a sane national policy on guns until the gun advocates give up on the fantasy that the best protection against armed psychopaths bent on random violence is regular people with loaded pistols on their belts.
Is there anything the other side can concede in return? Well, gun control advocates have to be careful not to say anything that demeans hunting. Virtually every politician in America has already gotten that message. (See Senator Chuck Schumer holding dead pheasants.) But it’s true that some city-dwellers can be snotty on this point.
“You don’t mess with hunting and fishing, because that’s part of who we are,” says Kathy Cramer Walsh, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who specializes in civic engagement. “A lot of times, talk about regulating guns and ammunition is seen as the outside trying to change who we are.”
I’ve been thinking about guns and Wisconsin lately, especially since Paul Ryan, a big fan of the arm-the-world theory of public safety, was picked to be a vice-presidential nominee.
Wisconsin has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the country. (The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence gives it three points out of a possible hundred.) It was also, of course, the scene of a terrible mass shooting this month by Wade Michael Page at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee. Page had a high-capacity magazine, which allowed him to shoot at least seventeen bullets before reloading. Those magazines tend to be a common theme in all our worst mass shooting incidents. The gunman at the shopping center in Tucson where Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot had one that held more than thirty bullets. The Colorado movie theater shooter had a hundred-bullet magazine.
The magazines used to be illegal before Congress let the assault weapons ban elapse. Getting rid of them again would not stop mass shootings, but it would limit the number of victims. And you do not need a high-capacity magazine for hunting. In fact, many states outlaw them for hunting, because they don’t want one person mowing down an entire flock or herd. Under federal law, you only can use guns with a maximum three-bullet capacity if you’re hunting migratory birds. Even the most completely mindless faction in the National Rifle Association appears willing to give that a pass.
“Hunting’s a different thing,” said Jeff Nass, the president of Wisconsin Force, an NRA affiliate. “The ducks and geese can’t shoot back.” Mass shootings, Nass contended, do not occur because crazy people have access to weapons that allow them to hit a large number of people in seconds. “Mass shootings come into play because nobody’s there defending themselves,” he said. “The solution is self-defense.”
So the guy driving toward the Sikh temple with the high-capacity magazine on his gun was legal, until he started shooting. The guy sitting in the duck blind, no. Mull that one over the weekend.